In Jorge Luis Borges' "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," the title character attempts to write Miguel de Cervantes' masterwork himself. Unwilling to settle for rewriting, much less paraphrasing or copying it, Menard makes effort after effort to conceive each phrase himself, striving for the intellectual and emotional experience of actually writing Don Quixote. The subject of the book Menard is trying to write and the absurdity of his quest are mirror images of one another, and while his project (like Quixote's) may be doomed to failure from the outset, it offers him purpose, and us insight, into the pathos and humor found in our own creative endeavors.

In the works in the exhibition, there appears to be a willingness to set aside historical arguments over the status of abstraction in the interest of playfully reconsidering just what that hotly contested subject might be (or might have been) in the first place. The works might re-imagine moments from Modernism, as they happened in a parallel universe that is just slightly different than this one. In a world primarily distinguishable from ours, they signal a rejection of the notion that every artwork dealing with abstraction must call attention to its condition as a palimpsest or collage of the works that came before it, possibly reminding us of what Menard might have felt in his rare, transitory moments of success: what it's like to arrive at something for oneself for the first time.